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International
The Scotsman
Sat 31 Dec 2005
Cuba hails arrival of 'comrade Morales'
MARC FRANK IN HAVANA
FIDEL Castro, the president of Cuba, yesterday welcomed Latin America's latest left-wing leader, Evo Morales, Bolivia's president-elect, to discuss political, economic and social co-operation.
A beaming Mr Castro greeted Mr Morales with a warm embrace. They have known each other for years.
"It appears the map is changing," Mr Castro said.
Mr Morales, an avowed socialist, chose communist Cuba for his first trip abroad since his overwhelming election victory two weeks ago.
"The Cubans are going to offer massive medical and educational assistance, like they did with Venezuela when Hugo Chavez became president," a Latin American diplomat predicted.
A government statement hailed Mr Morales's arrival on the eve of the 47th anniversary of the Cuban revolution that brought Mr Castro to power on 1 January, 1959.
"The presence of comrade Morales in Cuba fills our people with satisfaction and is an important stimulus to strengthen friendship and co-operation between the Cuban government and the future Bolivian government," the statement said.
Much to the chagrin of the United States, at 79 Mr Castro is less and less isolated in Latin America as left and centre-left parties come to power and strengthen their ties with Cuba.
Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina are all governed by progressive-minded independents, Mr Chavez has become Mr Castro's main ally and all Caribbean governments have restored diplomatic ties with Havana.
Like Mr Chavez and Mr Castro, Mr Morales is a fierce critic of the Bush administration and a supporter of Latin American integration.
©2005 Scotsman.com
Friday, December 30, 2005
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
Bush bubble burst by troubled 2005
FROM THE BBC
Bush bubble burst by troubled 2005
By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington
This time last year the graphic artists at Time Magazine were putting the finishing touches to an oil portrait of President Bush.
Two months after his re-election the picture would grace its cover and celebrate him as the recipient of one of the most eagerly awaited accolades in the US media, the person of the year award (2004): George W Bush, "revolutionary president".
Twelve months later the same man finds himself again on the cover of a magazine.
This time it is Newsweek and the commander in chief looks impish and helpless inside a soap bubble floating over the headline: "Bush's world. The isolated president. Can he change?"
President Bush has become "bubble boy", according to the New York Times, and his revolution seems to have popped.
Before most of Washington prepared to flee the capital for the holidays they dealt with one final pre-Christmas surprise.
Inside the Beltway dinner party conversation is currently dominated by a vocabulary that sends shivers down most civilised spines: 'extraordinary renditions', 'black sites' and 'water boarding'
The New York Times published an article, which it had been sitting on for a year, according to which the president personally allowed the super-secret National Security Agency to bug the e-mails and phone calls of Americans without getting the requisite approval of a secret court.
After a day's embarrassed silence the White House decided to go on the offensive, claiming that Congress had given Mr Bush the green light to use all necessary means to protect the country after 9/11.
Democrats - and quite a few Republicans - jumped up and said: "We only allowed you to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and defeat the Taleban. We didn't permit you to bug Americans without court approval!"
It is not clear whether this scandal will survive the Christmas turkey and the recess, but it has raised an issue at the heart of this presidency: How far can the president push his executive powers in the middle of a war?
Low political capital
George Bush has no doubt had his share of difficult years before, but in political terms 2005 must go down as his worst year in office.
His approval ratings had plummeted and are only now inching their way up the ladder.
The political capital he sought to spend after his re-election has been squandered on the flopped mission to reform social security.
The renewal of the Patriot Act, once considered a keystone piece of post-9/11 legislation in the war on terror, came unstuck in Congress.
Harriet Miers - his personal lawyer, friend and cherished pick for the Supreme Court - was humiliated and then hounded from nomination even though
President Bush had given "his word" that she was the right choice.
The president has been forced to back-pedal on the much heralded overhaul of immigration, thanks to opposition from his own party.
At the end of 2005 there is a lot to be depressed about around the White House Christmas tree. But in the current gloom it is easy to miss the seeds of recovery
Hurricane Katrina showed the alarming shortcomings of the administration in disaster relief, an area it had prided itself on.
Criminal indictments have washed up on the doorstep of the White House. His chief lieutenant on Capitol Hill, Tom DeLay, aka "the hammer", is facing the gavel of justice in Texas, over allegations that he misused corporate funds for election campaigns.
And hanging over everything is a war of choice that continues to haemorrhage lives, money and public support. Iraq will decide the president's legacy and will probably do so next year.
Torture, security and liberty
Inside the Beltway dinner party conversation is currently dominated by a vocabulary that sends shivers down most civilised spines: "extraordinary renditions", "black sites" and "water boarding".
The land of the free is debating exactly how painful the enhanced interrogation of prisoners needs to be before it can be called torture.
According to the administration anything short of organ failure and death is OK.
According to the Oxford dictionary and the Geneva Conventions that is going too far.
As a friend of mine - a Republican - put it over the din of a recent child's birthday party: "I am not surprised the rest of the world hates us!"
In recent weeks the White House has gone on the rhetorical offensive over Iraq by basking in humility and contrition
Despite 9/11, America is still a nation more comfortable with being loved than hated.
Today even supporters of the president are wondering whether in the tussle between liberty and security that defines the war on terror, liberty is biting the dust and security is creating some serious "blowback".
A week before Christmas, the White House was forced to bow to the wishes of John McCain, a Republican senator, who had himself been tortured during the Vietnam War.
He argued persuasively that even the most limited application of torture is morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive and ultimately misleading, because people tend to lie under torture just to make the pain go away.
Senator McCain did in Hanoi. His torturers asked him for a list of American spies and air crews.
He gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers football team and they went away satisfied.
Seeds of recovery
At the end of 2005 there is a lot to be depressed about around the White House Christmas tree.
But in the current gloom it is easy to miss the seeds of recovery.
The Iraqi parliamentary elections have turned out to be a resounding success. The Sunnis have broken the shackles of fear to flock to the polls in droves.
The challenge of building a viable coalition government is immense but the democratic instinct in Iraq is alive and kicking and that vindicates the president.
Moreover much of the security for the voting was provided by newly trained Iraqi troops.
The administration has already outlined the exit strategy from Iraq: as Iraqi troops stand up, American soldiers can stand down.
If there is a new mood of optimism at the beginning of 2006 the president needs to seize it with some key personnel changes at the White House and a clear vision of achievable goals
If the coming months of coalition horse trading don't disintegrate into chaos and the training of Iraqi troops continues apace - both admittedly big "ifs" - it is possible that the insurgency will lose its quorum of support and become marginalised.
In recent weeks the White House has gone on the rhetorical offensive over Iraq by basking in humility and contrition.
The president who was famous for never admitting fault cannot stop saying sorry: about failed intelligence on WMD; about strategic mishaps in handling the insurgency; about not being welcomed with bouquets of flowers.
The fragile Christmas bauble of contrition is then wrapped in the crisp paper of defiance: "We won't cut and run! We will do what it takes to achieve total victory."
Those who favour immediate withdrawal are labelled cowards. The mixture of defiance and contrition seems to work.
The most recent opinion polls have the president recovering just enough lost ground to end the year on a higher note.
Robust growth
Mr Bush's biggest assets are the apparent determination of the Iraqi people to rebuild their own country and the inability of the Democrats to proffer any coherent alternatives to the current policy.
In one corner Senator Joe Lieberman - who has been tipped by the rumour mill as a possible replacement for Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon - cries out that any criticism of the president is detrimental to the troops.
In the other corner, respected veterans like Rep Jack Murtha charge that the administration has bungled and that the troops should come home soon.
Meanwhile the economy has refused to tank. US growth is robust.
The US Federal Reserve is expected to slow down if not shelve the string of interest rate rises, Americans are spending less on petrol than they were two months ago and the barrage of hurricanes that careened through the Gulf Coast has done less damage to the economy than most soothsayers had predicted.
If there is a new mood of optimism at the beginning of 2006, the president needs to seize it with some key personnel changes at the White House and a clear vision of achievable goals.
The 2005 State of the Union address soared rhetorically to Mars and Middle East democracy. The next one could strike a humbler note.
The spirit of 9/11, when the administration wrapped every political move in the Stars and Stripes and even the opposition was afraid to ask awkward questions, is wearing off.
Officially America is at war - in Iraq and against terror - but most Americans don't feel as if they are living in a time of sacrifice. This is the schizophrenia of the second Bush term.
Starting on 4 January, 2006, Matt Frei will be writing a fortnightly diary from Washington for the BBC News website.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4550302.stmPublished: 2005/12/22 11:06:34 GMT© BBC MMV
Bush bubble burst by troubled 2005
By Matt Frei BBC News, Washington
This time last year the graphic artists at Time Magazine were putting the finishing touches to an oil portrait of President Bush.
Two months after his re-election the picture would grace its cover and celebrate him as the recipient of one of the most eagerly awaited accolades in the US media, the person of the year award (2004): George W Bush, "revolutionary president".
Twelve months later the same man finds himself again on the cover of a magazine.
This time it is Newsweek and the commander in chief looks impish and helpless inside a soap bubble floating over the headline: "Bush's world. The isolated president. Can he change?"
President Bush has become "bubble boy", according to the New York Times, and his revolution seems to have popped.
Before most of Washington prepared to flee the capital for the holidays they dealt with one final pre-Christmas surprise.
Inside the Beltway dinner party conversation is currently dominated by a vocabulary that sends shivers down most civilised spines: 'extraordinary renditions', 'black sites' and 'water boarding'
The New York Times published an article, which it had been sitting on for a year, according to which the president personally allowed the super-secret National Security Agency to bug the e-mails and phone calls of Americans without getting the requisite approval of a secret court.
After a day's embarrassed silence the White House decided to go on the offensive, claiming that Congress had given Mr Bush the green light to use all necessary means to protect the country after 9/11.
Democrats - and quite a few Republicans - jumped up and said: "We only allowed you to hunt down Osama Bin Laden and defeat the Taleban. We didn't permit you to bug Americans without court approval!"
It is not clear whether this scandal will survive the Christmas turkey and the recess, but it has raised an issue at the heart of this presidency: How far can the president push his executive powers in the middle of a war?
Low political capital
George Bush has no doubt had his share of difficult years before, but in political terms 2005 must go down as his worst year in office.
His approval ratings had plummeted and are only now inching their way up the ladder.
The political capital he sought to spend after his re-election has been squandered on the flopped mission to reform social security.
The renewal of the Patriot Act, once considered a keystone piece of post-9/11 legislation in the war on terror, came unstuck in Congress.
Harriet Miers - his personal lawyer, friend and cherished pick for the Supreme Court - was humiliated and then hounded from nomination even though
President Bush had given "his word" that she was the right choice.
The president has been forced to back-pedal on the much heralded overhaul of immigration, thanks to opposition from his own party.
At the end of 2005 there is a lot to be depressed about around the White House Christmas tree. But in the current gloom it is easy to miss the seeds of recovery
Hurricane Katrina showed the alarming shortcomings of the administration in disaster relief, an area it had prided itself on.
Criminal indictments have washed up on the doorstep of the White House. His chief lieutenant on Capitol Hill, Tom DeLay, aka "the hammer", is facing the gavel of justice in Texas, over allegations that he misused corporate funds for election campaigns.
And hanging over everything is a war of choice that continues to haemorrhage lives, money and public support. Iraq will decide the president's legacy and will probably do so next year.
Torture, security and liberty
Inside the Beltway dinner party conversation is currently dominated by a vocabulary that sends shivers down most civilised spines: "extraordinary renditions", "black sites" and "water boarding".
The land of the free is debating exactly how painful the enhanced interrogation of prisoners needs to be before it can be called torture.
According to the administration anything short of organ failure and death is OK.
According to the Oxford dictionary and the Geneva Conventions that is going too far.
As a friend of mine - a Republican - put it over the din of a recent child's birthday party: "I am not surprised the rest of the world hates us!"
In recent weeks the White House has gone on the rhetorical offensive over Iraq by basking in humility and contrition
Despite 9/11, America is still a nation more comfortable with being loved than hated.
Today even supporters of the president are wondering whether in the tussle between liberty and security that defines the war on terror, liberty is biting the dust and security is creating some serious "blowback".
A week before Christmas, the White House was forced to bow to the wishes of John McCain, a Republican senator, who had himself been tortured during the Vietnam War.
He argued persuasively that even the most limited application of torture is morally reprehensible, politically counter-productive and ultimately misleading, because people tend to lie under torture just to make the pain go away.
Senator McCain did in Hanoi. His torturers asked him for a list of American spies and air crews.
He gave them the names of the Green Bay Packers football team and they went away satisfied.
Seeds of recovery
At the end of 2005 there is a lot to be depressed about around the White House Christmas tree.
But in the current gloom it is easy to miss the seeds of recovery.
The Iraqi parliamentary elections have turned out to be a resounding success. The Sunnis have broken the shackles of fear to flock to the polls in droves.
The challenge of building a viable coalition government is immense but the democratic instinct in Iraq is alive and kicking and that vindicates the president.
Moreover much of the security for the voting was provided by newly trained Iraqi troops.
The administration has already outlined the exit strategy from Iraq: as Iraqi troops stand up, American soldiers can stand down.
If there is a new mood of optimism at the beginning of 2006 the president needs to seize it with some key personnel changes at the White House and a clear vision of achievable goals
If the coming months of coalition horse trading don't disintegrate into chaos and the training of Iraqi troops continues apace - both admittedly big "ifs" - it is possible that the insurgency will lose its quorum of support and become marginalised.
In recent weeks the White House has gone on the rhetorical offensive over Iraq by basking in humility and contrition.
The president who was famous for never admitting fault cannot stop saying sorry: about failed intelligence on WMD; about strategic mishaps in handling the insurgency; about not being welcomed with bouquets of flowers.
The fragile Christmas bauble of contrition is then wrapped in the crisp paper of defiance: "We won't cut and run! We will do what it takes to achieve total victory."
Those who favour immediate withdrawal are labelled cowards. The mixture of defiance and contrition seems to work.
The most recent opinion polls have the president recovering just enough lost ground to end the year on a higher note.
Robust growth
Mr Bush's biggest assets are the apparent determination of the Iraqi people to rebuild their own country and the inability of the Democrats to proffer any coherent alternatives to the current policy.
In one corner Senator Joe Lieberman - who has been tipped by the rumour mill as a possible replacement for Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon - cries out that any criticism of the president is detrimental to the troops.
In the other corner, respected veterans like Rep Jack Murtha charge that the administration has bungled and that the troops should come home soon.
Meanwhile the economy has refused to tank. US growth is robust.
The US Federal Reserve is expected to slow down if not shelve the string of interest rate rises, Americans are spending less on petrol than they were two months ago and the barrage of hurricanes that careened through the Gulf Coast has done less damage to the economy than most soothsayers had predicted.
If there is a new mood of optimism at the beginning of 2006, the president needs to seize it with some key personnel changes at the White House and a clear vision of achievable goals.
The 2005 State of the Union address soared rhetorically to Mars and Middle East democracy. The next one could strike a humbler note.
The spirit of 9/11, when the administration wrapped every political move in the Stars and Stripes and even the opposition was afraid to ask awkward questions, is wearing off.
Officially America is at war - in Iraq and against terror - but most Americans don't feel as if they are living in a time of sacrifice. This is the schizophrenia of the second Bush term.
Starting on 4 January, 2006, Matt Frei will be writing a fortnightly diary from Washington for the BBC News website.
Story from BBC NEWS:http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/4550302.stmPublished: 2005/12/22 11:06:34 GMT© BBC MMV
Go see it -- Brokeback Mountain
It is a lush film, tells a story well ---one of the oldest facing human kind—LOVE; and it will likely be considered a classic, one referred to as an exemplary achievement in filmmaking.
As my film companion stated, how remarkable, where almost every frame is part of the simple story told in its own time. Lush, you can almost smell the sheep, feel the cold of the coming snow –the pictorial and emotional detail all play part in supporting the stories time/speed.
Love, as the window pan nearing the end, emblematic of "the possibility" of a life lived and not pursued with conviction and passion. Not passion in a pedestrian sense, cheapened by the moralist, but passion with the heart aflame, or life filling draught. Love that bears friendship, love that crosses time/distance-scape, and a quiet reassurance of feeling something unlike what is known.
The cinematographer, editor, director, actors, and nature itself seemed to have agreed to cooperate in the nuance passing of time through this film. There also doesn’t seem to be a wasted gesture or overtly indulgent scene, a short story turned into an epic. The music and silence worked together as vehicle for keeping time and emoting what cannot be expressed. To the men and women who contributed to Brokeback Mountain, the accolades and perhaps the box office returns are well deserved.
I will share more after seeing it again. This is a big screen film. A DVD may be nice to have in one’s collection, but it needs the giant screen to experience the vast terrain of the film. This could be one of the best contemporary films I’ve seen.
As my film companion stated, how remarkable, where almost every frame is part of the simple story told in its own time. Lush, you can almost smell the sheep, feel the cold of the coming snow –the pictorial and emotional detail all play part in supporting the stories time/speed.
Love, as the window pan nearing the end, emblematic of "the possibility" of a life lived and not pursued with conviction and passion. Not passion in a pedestrian sense, cheapened by the moralist, but passion with the heart aflame, or life filling draught. Love that bears friendship, love that crosses time/distance-scape, and a quiet reassurance of feeling something unlike what is known.
The cinematographer, editor, director, actors, and nature itself seemed to have agreed to cooperate in the nuance passing of time through this film. There also doesn’t seem to be a wasted gesture or overtly indulgent scene, a short story turned into an epic. The music and silence worked together as vehicle for keeping time and emoting what cannot be expressed. To the men and women who contributed to Brokeback Mountain, the accolades and perhaps the box office returns are well deserved.
I will share more after seeing it again. This is a big screen film. A DVD may be nice to have in one’s collection, but it needs the giant screen to experience the vast terrain of the film. This could be one of the best contemporary films I’ve seen.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
From the Director -- Brokeback Mountain
Blogger's Comment:
It has been two weeks since it's release, the film seem to have gained traction both among the critics and the audience. The film has landed on the top 10 ten grossing movies, of note this one distributed in less than 1000 screens (WashBlade). Friends who've seen it, tell me go. Will do so when wider distribution/decreasing interest provides for budget conscious film goers.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Ang Lee on What Asians, Gays and Cowboys Share
Asian Week, Q & A, Joy Guan, Dec 17, 2005
Director Ang Lee has a history of being a trailblazer, and his new film, Brokeback Mountain, is no exception, both in subject matter and cinematic style. He made his directorial debut with Pushing Hands (1992), followed by The Wedding Banquet in 1993, which garnered film festival awards as well as Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is considered one of Lee’s greatest works and is America’s highest-grossing foreign-language film. Lee is also one of the first Chinese-born directors to cross cultures telling stories with no Asian content or actors, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), and The Incredible Hulk (2003)
AW: How do you select the films that you work on, and what characterizes a signature Ang Lee film?
At heart, I am a dramatist, and love dramatic elements and conflict. A signature Ang Lee film addresses the conflict between personal free will, and social pressures or obligation. Nice guys always struggle, and I like to peel the comfortable covers off and explore that uncomfortable zone, which is revealed when common codes of behavior are violated. A subcurrent of repression always runs through my films. … If a project is not scary and sensitive, then it’s probably less interesting to me.My upbringing in Taiwan makes my interest in these stories extremely personal. Growing up, my artistic leanings were always repressed because there was always pressure to do something “useful” like be a doctor.
AW: Part of what makes your films so powerful is your unwavering attention to detail and authenticity. How do you immerse yourself in cultures completely different from yours?Various stories require different genres, and I like the genre-hopping very much, as I get the opportunity to work with vastly different societies and film crews.In terms of creating authenticity in order to portray a [different] culture — I just try my best to survive because the material possesses me. I am attracted to the unfamiliar and am curious to find out why I am so moved when I find a compelling story. When I’m possessed, I tend to forget about the danger ground. You feel very dumb when you don’t know about something and there will always be an awkward learning curve.Creating authenticity is not that hard compared to evoking the intended reaction from audiences.
AW: Many Asian directors and actors seem to be typecast and work in only one genre or culture. Have you ever felt limited by people’s expectations?
It’s easy to be pigeonholed. I am more free from that because I generate and choose my own material. Since release of The Wedding Banquet, I have developed relationships with international distributors, giving me more freedom and control over how my films are released. I don’t do big Hollywood movies [The Incredible Hulk is an exception], so the trade-off is we don’t have huge budgets and need to be budget-conscious. My cross-cultural body of work does seem to be unique amongst Asian filmmakers.I’m like a rolling stone; I don’t like to gather moss and always need to keep fresh. Many directors are not comfortable with the trade-offs of doing that. For instance, John Woo may want to do something different, but won’t get the budget, creating a barrier for him to branch out from the genre and style that people seek him out for.AW: What is the anticipated reaction for this film from both critics and the general public, and how does the feedback affect you?So far the reaction to Brokeback Mountain has been very positive, and it’s a story with lots of deep emotion. I’m not sure what to expect, although some denial is expected — some people will claim that there are no gays in Wyoming, although of course there are. At the same time, the subject matter of this film is different because it addresses universal feelings — above all, it is a romantic love story, and probably won’t be mislabeled as merely a gay film.
AW: ‘The Wedding Banquet’ was a story of cultural and generational differences between a gay New Yorker and his Taiwanese parents; does ‘Brokeback Mountain’ feel similar? To me, these two stories are very different. The Wedding Banquet is a family drama, originally made for a mainstream Taiwanese audience. It is a comedy of mannerisms and a social commentary. Brokeback Mountain deals with the secrecy of a homosexual lifestyle and is fundamentally a story about romance.
AW: Your love seems to be for drama and storytelling –– do you see yourself producing anything other than films?
The infrastructure that supports my filmmaking is my sense of social obligation –– the feeling that there are stories to be told. I am a filmmaker at heart, and am happy to make one movie after another. For me, this is the best medium for me to communicate and reveal the drama of the human condition.
AW: Cowboys are not known for openly expressing their emotions. Asians share a similar stereotype. Do you see any parallels between Asians and cowboys in how they deal with taboo sexual subjects such as homosexuality?
I see the themes of repression in Brokeback Mountain as being universal regardless of culture. However, it is true that Eastern culture and the nature of cowboys share a certain indirectness, quiet nature, and use of body language to communicate that are quite similar. There are similarities in the art of the two cultures as well –– they both emphasize feelings of sadness, melancholy, and expansive space through various media.The difference is that Western culture is more macho, whereas Eastern culture is –– more lunar and feminine in nature. Thus, when it comes to attitudes about homosexuality, my personal theory is that Eastern culture is more relaxed than in the West. This stems from a difference in why a culture perceives homosexuality to be wrong –– in Western culture, it stems from religion, and you are condemned if you are gay. Eastern culture seems more, flexible –– and being gay is more of a social issue than a religious one; there is no deity to offend. The West also seems to tolerate lesbians more than gays because it’s a very macho culture; homosexuality is not okay because it threatens this culture. Of course, this is my observation in general –– I am sure that there are happy gay ranch hands in Wyoming with very sensitive neighbors as well.
Dec 19, 2005
Ang Lee on What Asians, Gays and Cowboys Share
New America Media is a project of Pacific News Service Copyright © Pacific News ServiceEngine Powered by DW Alliance
It has been two weeks since it's release, the film seem to have gained traction both among the critics and the audience. The film has landed on the top 10 ten grossing movies, of note this one distributed in less than 1000 screens (WashBlade). Friends who've seen it, tell me go. Will do so when wider distribution/decreasing interest provides for budget conscious film goers.
8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888
Ang Lee on What Asians, Gays and Cowboys Share
Asian Week, Q & A, Joy Guan, Dec 17, 2005
Director Ang Lee has a history of being a trailblazer, and his new film, Brokeback Mountain, is no exception, both in subject matter and cinematic style. He made his directorial debut with Pushing Hands (1992), followed by The Wedding Banquet in 1993, which garnered film festival awards as well as Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) is considered one of Lee’s greatest works and is America’s highest-grossing foreign-language film. Lee is also one of the first Chinese-born directors to cross cultures telling stories with no Asian content or actors, including Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), Ride with the Devil (1999), and The Incredible Hulk (2003)
AW: How do you select the films that you work on, and what characterizes a signature Ang Lee film?
At heart, I am a dramatist, and love dramatic elements and conflict. A signature Ang Lee film addresses the conflict between personal free will, and social pressures or obligation. Nice guys always struggle, and I like to peel the comfortable covers off and explore that uncomfortable zone, which is revealed when common codes of behavior are violated. A subcurrent of repression always runs through my films. … If a project is not scary and sensitive, then it’s probably less interesting to me.My upbringing in Taiwan makes my interest in these stories extremely personal. Growing up, my artistic leanings were always repressed because there was always pressure to do something “useful” like be a doctor.
AW: Part of what makes your films so powerful is your unwavering attention to detail and authenticity. How do you immerse yourself in cultures completely different from yours?Various stories require different genres, and I like the genre-hopping very much, as I get the opportunity to work with vastly different societies and film crews.In terms of creating authenticity in order to portray a [different] culture — I just try my best to survive because the material possesses me. I am attracted to the unfamiliar and am curious to find out why I am so moved when I find a compelling story. When I’m possessed, I tend to forget about the danger ground. You feel very dumb when you don’t know about something and there will always be an awkward learning curve.Creating authenticity is not that hard compared to evoking the intended reaction from audiences.
AW: Many Asian directors and actors seem to be typecast and work in only one genre or culture. Have you ever felt limited by people’s expectations?
It’s easy to be pigeonholed. I am more free from that because I generate and choose my own material. Since release of The Wedding Banquet, I have developed relationships with international distributors, giving me more freedom and control over how my films are released. I don’t do big Hollywood movies [The Incredible Hulk is an exception], so the trade-off is we don’t have huge budgets and need to be budget-conscious. My cross-cultural body of work does seem to be unique amongst Asian filmmakers.I’m like a rolling stone; I don’t like to gather moss and always need to keep fresh. Many directors are not comfortable with the trade-offs of doing that. For instance, John Woo may want to do something different, but won’t get the budget, creating a barrier for him to branch out from the genre and style that people seek him out for.AW: What is the anticipated reaction for this film from both critics and the general public, and how does the feedback affect you?So far the reaction to Brokeback Mountain has been very positive, and it’s a story with lots of deep emotion. I’m not sure what to expect, although some denial is expected — some people will claim that there are no gays in Wyoming, although of course there are. At the same time, the subject matter of this film is different because it addresses universal feelings — above all, it is a romantic love story, and probably won’t be mislabeled as merely a gay film.
AW: ‘The Wedding Banquet’ was a story of cultural and generational differences between a gay New Yorker and his Taiwanese parents; does ‘Brokeback Mountain’ feel similar? To me, these two stories are very different. The Wedding Banquet is a family drama, originally made for a mainstream Taiwanese audience. It is a comedy of mannerisms and a social commentary. Brokeback Mountain deals with the secrecy of a homosexual lifestyle and is fundamentally a story about romance.
AW: Your love seems to be for drama and storytelling –– do you see yourself producing anything other than films?
The infrastructure that supports my filmmaking is my sense of social obligation –– the feeling that there are stories to be told. I am a filmmaker at heart, and am happy to make one movie after another. For me, this is the best medium for me to communicate and reveal the drama of the human condition.
AW: Cowboys are not known for openly expressing their emotions. Asians share a similar stereotype. Do you see any parallels between Asians and cowboys in how they deal with taboo sexual subjects such as homosexuality?
I see the themes of repression in Brokeback Mountain as being universal regardless of culture. However, it is true that Eastern culture and the nature of cowboys share a certain indirectness, quiet nature, and use of body language to communicate that are quite similar. There are similarities in the art of the two cultures as well –– they both emphasize feelings of sadness, melancholy, and expansive space through various media.The difference is that Western culture is more macho, whereas Eastern culture is –– more lunar and feminine in nature. Thus, when it comes to attitudes about homosexuality, my personal theory is that Eastern culture is more relaxed than in the West. This stems from a difference in why a culture perceives homosexuality to be wrong –– in Western culture, it stems from religion, and you are condemned if you are gay. Eastern culture seems more, flexible –– and being gay is more of a social issue than a religious one; there is no deity to offend. The West also seems to tolerate lesbians more than gays because it’s a very macho culture; homosexuality is not okay because it threatens this culture. Of course, this is my observation in general –– I am sure that there are happy gay ranch hands in Wyoming with very sensitive neighbors as well.
Dec 19, 2005
Ang Lee on What Asians, Gays and Cowboys Share
New America Media is a project of Pacific News Service Copyright © Pacific News ServiceEngine Powered by DW Alliance
Friday, December 09, 2005
Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off
Blogger's Note: A segment of the proponents arguing that Christmas without Christ is something to boycott stores over, how about Christmas Mass on a Sunday? What is wrong with this picture? better yet, watch it in your home dvd.
We do not need a Limbaugh to lampoon the Evangelicals, they do a pretty good job left to themselves. Yes, they will also eat their young, better yet send them off to war and be chosen for slaughter, good christians they profess to be.
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NYTIMES
December 9, 2005
When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Some of the nation's most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on the Sunday that coincides with Christmas Day, a move that is generating controversy among evangelical Christians at a time when many conservative groups are battling to "put the Christ back in Christmas."
Megachurch leaders say that the decision is in keeping with their innovative and "family friendly" approach and that they are compensating in other ways. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., always a pacesetter among megachurches, is handing out a DVD it produced for the occasion that features a heartwarming contemporary Christmas tale.
"What we're encouraging people to do is take that DVD and in the comfort of their living room, with friends and family, pop it into the player and hopefully hear a different and more personal and maybe more intimate Christmas message, that God is with us wherever we are," said Cally Parkinson, communications director at Willow Creek, which draws 20,000 people on a typical Sunday.
Megachurches have long been criticized for offering "theology lite," but some critics say that this time the churches have gone too far in the quest to make Christianity accessible to spiritual seekers.
"I see this in many ways as a capitulation to narcissism, the self-centered, me-first, I'm going to put me and my immediate family first agenda of the larger culture," said Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. "If Christianity is an evangelistic religion, then what kind of message is this sending to the larger culture - that worship is an optional extra?"
John D. Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College, asked: "What about the people in society without strong family connections? The elderly, single people a long distance from family, or people who are simply lonely and for whom church and prayers would be a significant part of their day?"
The uproar is not only over closing the churches on Christmas Day, because some evangelical churches large and small have done that in recent years and made Christmas Eve the big draw, without attracting much criticism.
What some consider the deeper affront is in canceling services on a Sunday, which most Christian churches consider the Lord's Day, when communal worship is an obligation. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 1994. Some of these same megachurches remained open them, they say, but found attendance sparse.
Since then, the perennial culture wars over the secularization of Christmas have intensified, and this year the scuffles are especially lively. Conservative Christian groups are boycotting stores that fail to mention
"Christmas" in their holiday greetings or advertising campaigns. Schools are being pressured to refer to the December vacation as "Christmas break." Even the White House came under attack this week for sending out cards with best wishes for the "holiday season."
When the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia sent out a press release last Friday announcing plans for a "holiday tree" lighting, a half-hour later it sent out another saying, "It is in fact a Christmas tree."
For years, it has been an open secret that many mainline Protestant churches are half empty - or worse - on Christmas Day. The churches' emphasis has been instead on the days leading up to Christmas, with Christmas Eve attracting the most worshipers. Some of the megachurches closing on Christmas this year have increased the number of services in the days before.
But for the vast majority of the other churches, closing down on Christmas Sunday would be unthinkable.
"I can't even imagine not observing Christmas in an Episcopal church," said Robert Williams, a spokesman for the Episcopal Church USA. "The only thing I could think of would be a summer chapel that might be shut down anyway."
In many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, known for their rich liturgical traditions, Christmas Day attracts far more worshippers than an average Sunday. Grown children return with their parents to the parishes they belonged to when they were young.
"From the Catholic perspective, the whole purpose of the holiday is to celebrate it as a religious holiday in the company of the community, and for Catholics that means at Mass," said Robert J. Miller, director of research and planning in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Canceling worship on Christmas Day appears to be predominantly a megachurch phenomenon, sociologists of religion say.
"This attachment to a particular day on the calendar is just not something that megachurches have been known for," Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University, said. "They're known for being flexible and creative, and not for taking these traditions, seasons, dates and symbols really seriously."
At least eight megachurches have canceled their Christmas services. They are only a fraction of the 1,200 or so in the country, but they are influential, Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary, said. The trend has been reported in The Lexington Herald-Leader and in other newspapers.
Besides Willow Creek, the churches include Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky.; Crossroads Christian Church in Lexington, Ky.; Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex.; Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, S.C.; North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga.; First Baptist in Atlanta; and Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Mich.
Many other megachurches that are staying open on Christmas Day are holding fewer services than they would on a typical Sunday. New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, in Lithonia, Ga., with about 25,000 members, will hold only one of its usual two services this Christmas Day.
Bishop Eddie L. Long, the senior pastor, said that his church was "always promoting family," and that many members of his congregation were transplants to the Atlanta area who traveled far away to be with their families on Christmas.
"We're encouraging our members to do a family worship," Bishop Long said. "They could wake up and read Scripture and pray and sometimes sing a song, and go over the true meaning of what Christmas is, before opening up their gifts. It keeps them together and not running off to get dressed up to go off to church."
His church offers streaming video of the Sunday service, and Bishop Long said he expected a spike in viewers this Christmas. "They have an option if they want to join their family around the computer and worship with us," he said.
Staff members at Willow Creek said they had had few complaints from members about the church closing on Christmas. Said the Rev. Mark Ashton, whose title is pastor of spiritual discovery: "We've always been a church that's been on the edge of innovation. We've been willing to try and experiment, so this is another one of those innovations."
The real question is not why churches are skipping Christmas, but why individual Christians are skipping church on the second holiest day on the Christian calendar next to Easter, said Mr. Thumma.
"I think these critics who decry the megachurches should really be aiming their barbs at individual Christians who are willing to stay at home around the Christmas tree instead of coming and giving at least part of that day to the meaning of the holiday," he said. "They should be facing up to the reality of that."
We do not need a Limbaugh to lampoon the Evangelicals, they do a pretty good job left to themselves. Yes, they will also eat their young, better yet send them off to war and be chosen for slaughter, good christians they profess to be.
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NYTIMES
December 9, 2005
When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
Some of the nation's most prominent megachurches have decided not to hold worship services on the Sunday that coincides with Christmas Day, a move that is generating controversy among evangelical Christians at a time when many conservative groups are battling to "put the Christ back in Christmas."
Megachurch leaders say that the decision is in keeping with their innovative and "family friendly" approach and that they are compensating in other ways. Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., always a pacesetter among megachurches, is handing out a DVD it produced for the occasion that features a heartwarming contemporary Christmas tale.
"What we're encouraging people to do is take that DVD and in the comfort of their living room, with friends and family, pop it into the player and hopefully hear a different and more personal and maybe more intimate Christmas message, that God is with us wherever we are," said Cally Parkinson, communications director at Willow Creek, which draws 20,000 people on a typical Sunday.
Megachurches have long been criticized for offering "theology lite," but some critics say that this time the churches have gone too far in the quest to make Christianity accessible to spiritual seekers.
"I see this in many ways as a capitulation to narcissism, the self-centered, me-first, I'm going to put me and my immediate family first agenda of the larger culture," said Ben Witherington III, professor of New Testament interpretation at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Ky. "If Christianity is an evangelistic religion, then what kind of message is this sending to the larger culture - that worship is an optional extra?"
John D. Witvliet, director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship at Calvin College, asked: "What about the people in society without strong family connections? The elderly, single people a long distance from family, or people who are simply lonely and for whom church and prayers would be a significant part of their day?"
The uproar is not only over closing the churches on Christmas Day, because some evangelical churches large and small have done that in recent years and made Christmas Eve the big draw, without attracting much criticism.
What some consider the deeper affront is in canceling services on a Sunday, which most Christian churches consider the Lord's Day, when communal worship is an obligation. The last time Christmas fell on a Sunday was in 1994. Some of these same megachurches remained open them, they say, but found attendance sparse.
Since then, the perennial culture wars over the secularization of Christmas have intensified, and this year the scuffles are especially lively. Conservative Christian groups are boycotting stores that fail to mention
"Christmas" in their holiday greetings or advertising campaigns. Schools are being pressured to refer to the December vacation as "Christmas break." Even the White House came under attack this week for sending out cards with best wishes for the "holiday season."
When the office of Gov. Sonny Perdue of Georgia sent out a press release last Friday announcing plans for a "holiday tree" lighting, a half-hour later it sent out another saying, "It is in fact a Christmas tree."
For years, it has been an open secret that many mainline Protestant churches are half empty - or worse - on Christmas Day. The churches' emphasis has been instead on the days leading up to Christmas, with Christmas Eve attracting the most worshipers. Some of the megachurches closing on Christmas this year have increased the number of services in the days before.
But for the vast majority of the other churches, closing down on Christmas Sunday would be unthinkable.
"I can't even imagine not observing Christmas in an Episcopal church," said Robert Williams, a spokesman for the Episcopal Church USA. "The only thing I could think of would be a summer chapel that might be shut down anyway."
In many Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, known for their rich liturgical traditions, Christmas Day attracts far more worshippers than an average Sunday. Grown children return with their parents to the parishes they belonged to when they were young.
"From the Catholic perspective, the whole purpose of the holiday is to celebrate it as a religious holiday in the company of the community, and for Catholics that means at Mass," said Robert J. Miller, director of research and planning in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
Canceling worship on Christmas Day appears to be predominantly a megachurch phenomenon, sociologists of religion say.
"This attachment to a particular day on the calendar is just not something that megachurches have been known for," Nancy Ammerman, a sociologist of religion at Boston University, said. "They're known for being flexible and creative, and not for taking these traditions, seasons, dates and symbols really seriously."
At least eight megachurches have canceled their Christmas services. They are only a fraction of the 1,200 or so in the country, but they are influential, Scott Thumma, a sociologist of religion at Hartford Seminary, said. The trend has been reported in The Lexington Herald-Leader and in other newspapers.
Besides Willow Creek, the churches include Southland Christian Church in Nicholasville, Ky.; Crossroads Christian Church in Lexington, Ky.; Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Tex.; Redemption World Outreach Center in Greenville, S.C.; North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga.; First Baptist in Atlanta; and Mars Hill Bible Church in Grandville, Mich.
Many other megachurches that are staying open on Christmas Day are holding fewer services than they would on a typical Sunday. New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, in Lithonia, Ga., with about 25,000 members, will hold only one of its usual two services this Christmas Day.
Bishop Eddie L. Long, the senior pastor, said that his church was "always promoting family," and that many members of his congregation were transplants to the Atlanta area who traveled far away to be with their families on Christmas.
"We're encouraging our members to do a family worship," Bishop Long said. "They could wake up and read Scripture and pray and sometimes sing a song, and go over the true meaning of what Christmas is, before opening up their gifts. It keeps them together and not running off to get dressed up to go off to church."
His church offers streaming video of the Sunday service, and Bishop Long said he expected a spike in viewers this Christmas. "They have an option if they want to join their family around the computer and worship with us," he said.
Staff members at Willow Creek said they had had few complaints from members about the church closing on Christmas. Said the Rev. Mark Ashton, whose title is pastor of spiritual discovery: "We've always been a church that's been on the edge of innovation. We've been willing to try and experiment, so this is another one of those innovations."
The real question is not why churches are skipping Christmas, but why individual Christians are skipping church on the second holiest day on the Christian calendar next to Easter, said Mr. Thumma.
"I think these critics who decry the megachurches should really be aiming their barbs at individual Christians who are willing to stay at home around the Christmas tree instead of coming and giving at least part of that day to the meaning of the holiday," he said. "They should be facing up to the reality of that."
Jesus Bans "Christian" Group
Blogger's Note: Friday levity not leviticus.
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Jesus Bans "Christian" Group Shocking announcement sends militant Focus on the Family organization into crazed tailspin -
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 9, 2005
In an astonishing but not completely unexpected announcement, Jesus H. Christ, vice president and CFO of All That Is Inc., appeared today on a large tortilla at a roadside taco stand in Zacatecas, Mexico, to announce that, effective immediately, the pseudo-Christian group Focus on the Family, led by Dr. James Dobson and best known for its blazing hatred of gays and its fear of glimpsing the human female nipple during nationally televised sporting events, is effectively banned from His Divine Beneficence.
"What happened was, the heavens and all spirits of goodness, along with Buddha and Shiva and Allah and Kali and a few others, well, we were having some margaritas and playing poker and tossing around recent headlines, when Allah chimed in that this Focus on the Family group -- a real scab on my big toe for years, I gotta tell you -- well, they just decided to yank all their accounts from a bank over the bank's support of gay rights," said Jesus, dressed in black Diesel jeans, Hugo Boss motorcycle boots and a snug tank top featuring a large OM symbol across the chest.
"J-Dog," as he is known to his friends, was referring, of course, to the recent story about how the militant, Colorado-based "Christian" group has just pulled all its accounts from Wells Fargo Bank after learning that the bank had donated a small sum of money to gay rights causes, including GLAAD, a sum totaling about $50,000, or about one-tenth of what Wells Fargo gave to the GOP last year.
The Christ, apparently, had had enough.
"This is what I realized: Rampant homophobia, ignorance of sex, derision of women's rights, a decided love of tepid dogmatic sameness at the expense of the luminosity and uniqueness of the individual human soul -- it was all just too much," Jesus said, this time appearing as a curiously shaped oil stain on a freeway underpass in Saragossa, Spain. "Then the bank thing happened and it was the straw that broke the Mary's back."
It was, apparently, the right response. "Totally in the moment," said Buddha, nodding vigorously in agreement. "It's about time," Vishnu sighed, painting his nails beet red and lighting some Nag Champa incense. "It's decisive and it sends a message," agreed Kali, counting her poker winnings. "You guys have any hummus?" Allah muttered, rifling through Christ's well-stocked fridge and not really paying attention.
"A slight ban is definitely in order," Christ continued, calmly, now appearing in a pile of instant mashed potatoes in a truck stop in Bowling Green, Ky., where his visage appeared to be weeping, but which Jesus said was merely caused by all the onions he'd been chopping to make his famed "Holy Christ!" hot salsa for the Seraphim Christmas office party.
"Nothing serious, just maybe three, four thousand years wherein these Focus on the Family nutballs and especially this hateful Dobson fellow shall receive only sporadic blessings and deferred prayer responses and will have to go all the way to the back of the line, behind Dick Cheney and Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson, to await salvation."
"Hell, I still love them all. Even Dobson," the One added, flashing his trademark dazzling, compassionate grin. "I just don't like them very much."
When the news reached Focus on the Family's Colorado Springs headquarters, stunned members were seen running into walls and bashing their foreheads with large Bibles and ramming their Toyota Corollas and Ford pickups into each other and muttering incoherent lines from "Passion of the Christ" and popping Prozac like M&M's.
"Where are the Ken dolls! Someone get to the dungeon and make sure my Ken doll collection is safe!" screamed James Dobson himself, emerging from a secret room in a fuchsia leotard and launching into a bizarre rant no one could quite understand. Reporters seeking comment could only look at each other in stunned silence, wishing they could be in a bar somewhere.
In related news, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, another right-wing, anti-gay Christian group that allegedly pressured Ford Motor Co. into yanking much of its advertising from upscale gay publications, has, apparently, accidentally banned itself.
"Someone who is no longer in the organization had the bright idea that we should ban any American company or group that supported the outright ignorance of Christ's true message," sighed AFA chairman Donald Wildmon, chugging from a large bottle of Red Bull and stroking the hairless cat in his lap and making a strange hissing noise with his tongue. "Hell, it sounded great at the 'Harry Potter' book-burning rally. But then again, most everyone was buzzed on spiked Kool-Aid and Kumbaya pie."
"Turns out, when all votes were counted, the group that most needed banning, besides the Catholic church and Dobson's clan, was us. Apparently, we have no real clue as to what Christ truly stood for. Who knew?"
Effective immediately, the AFA's ban on itself means its members will no longer be able support or endorse anything it says or does, until further notice from itself.
"It makes shopping, like, totally impossible," said Beth-Ann Binderbottom, mother of nine and AFA member for the past 17 years and devout watcher of "Touched by an Angel" and committed scourer of all live radio and TV programming for any trace of female nipples, curse words or Jessica Simpson's butt.
"Due to the ban on myself, I now I have to buy the exact opposite of everything I would normally buy," she lamented. "What the gosh-golly heck am I supposed to do with all these green vegetables, Tom Robbins books, bottles of wine and hot porn DVDs?"
Christ, who will be in negotiations with the lords of the underworld next week about what can be done about Jerry Falwell, summarized it this way: "Hell, at the root of it, we're all pagans," JC said with a wink, from a lovely pattern of bark on an old-growth sycamore in a heavily wooded forest somewhere in Bavaria.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/09/notes120905.DTL
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Jesus Bans "Christian" Group Shocking announcement sends militant Focus on the Family organization into crazed tailspin -
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, December 9, 2005
In an astonishing but not completely unexpected announcement, Jesus H. Christ, vice president and CFO of All That Is Inc., appeared today on a large tortilla at a roadside taco stand in Zacatecas, Mexico, to announce that, effective immediately, the pseudo-Christian group Focus on the Family, led by Dr. James Dobson and best known for its blazing hatred of gays and its fear of glimpsing the human female nipple during nationally televised sporting events, is effectively banned from His Divine Beneficence.
"What happened was, the heavens and all spirits of goodness, along with Buddha and Shiva and Allah and Kali and a few others, well, we were having some margaritas and playing poker and tossing around recent headlines, when Allah chimed in that this Focus on the Family group -- a real scab on my big toe for years, I gotta tell you -- well, they just decided to yank all their accounts from a bank over the bank's support of gay rights," said Jesus, dressed in black Diesel jeans, Hugo Boss motorcycle boots and a snug tank top featuring a large OM symbol across the chest.
"J-Dog," as he is known to his friends, was referring, of course, to the recent story about how the militant, Colorado-based "Christian" group has just pulled all its accounts from Wells Fargo Bank after learning that the bank had donated a small sum of money to gay rights causes, including GLAAD, a sum totaling about $50,000, or about one-tenth of what Wells Fargo gave to the GOP last year.
The Christ, apparently, had had enough.
"This is what I realized: Rampant homophobia, ignorance of sex, derision of women's rights, a decided love of tepid dogmatic sameness at the expense of the luminosity and uniqueness of the individual human soul -- it was all just too much," Jesus said, this time appearing as a curiously shaped oil stain on a freeway underpass in Saragossa, Spain. "Then the bank thing happened and it was the straw that broke the Mary's back."
It was, apparently, the right response. "Totally in the moment," said Buddha, nodding vigorously in agreement. "It's about time," Vishnu sighed, painting his nails beet red and lighting some Nag Champa incense. "It's decisive and it sends a message," agreed Kali, counting her poker winnings. "You guys have any hummus?" Allah muttered, rifling through Christ's well-stocked fridge and not really paying attention.
"A slight ban is definitely in order," Christ continued, calmly, now appearing in a pile of instant mashed potatoes in a truck stop in Bowling Green, Ky., where his visage appeared to be weeping, but which Jesus said was merely caused by all the onions he'd been chopping to make his famed "Holy Christ!" hot salsa for the Seraphim Christmas office party.
"Nothing serious, just maybe three, four thousand years wherein these Focus on the Family nutballs and especially this hateful Dobson fellow shall receive only sporadic blessings and deferred prayer responses and will have to go all the way to the back of the line, behind Dick Cheney and Tim LaHaye and Mel Gibson, to await salvation."
"Hell, I still love them all. Even Dobson," the One added, flashing his trademark dazzling, compassionate grin. "I just don't like them very much."
When the news reached Focus on the Family's Colorado Springs headquarters, stunned members were seen running into walls and bashing their foreheads with large Bibles and ramming their Toyota Corollas and Ford pickups into each other and muttering incoherent lines from "Passion of the Christ" and popping Prozac like M&M's.
"Where are the Ken dolls! Someone get to the dungeon and make sure my Ken doll collection is safe!" screamed James Dobson himself, emerging from a secret room in a fuchsia leotard and launching into a bizarre rant no one could quite understand. Reporters seeking comment could only look at each other in stunned silence, wishing they could be in a bar somewhere.
In related news, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association, another right-wing, anti-gay Christian group that allegedly pressured Ford Motor Co. into yanking much of its advertising from upscale gay publications, has, apparently, accidentally banned itself.
"Someone who is no longer in the organization had the bright idea that we should ban any American company or group that supported the outright ignorance of Christ's true message," sighed AFA chairman Donald Wildmon, chugging from a large bottle of Red Bull and stroking the hairless cat in his lap and making a strange hissing noise with his tongue. "Hell, it sounded great at the 'Harry Potter' book-burning rally. But then again, most everyone was buzzed on spiked Kool-Aid and Kumbaya pie."
"Turns out, when all votes were counted, the group that most needed banning, besides the Catholic church and Dobson's clan, was us. Apparently, we have no real clue as to what Christ truly stood for. Who knew?"
Effective immediately, the AFA's ban on itself means its members will no longer be able support or endorse anything it says or does, until further notice from itself.
"It makes shopping, like, totally impossible," said Beth-Ann Binderbottom, mother of nine and AFA member for the past 17 years and devout watcher of "Touched by an Angel" and committed scourer of all live radio and TV programming for any trace of female nipples, curse words or Jessica Simpson's butt.
"Due to the ban on myself, I now I have to buy the exact opposite of everything I would normally buy," she lamented. "What the gosh-golly heck am I supposed to do with all these green vegetables, Tom Robbins books, bottles of wine and hot porn DVDs?"
Christ, who will be in negotiations with the lords of the underworld next week about what can be done about Jerry Falwell, summarized it this way: "Hell, at the root of it, we're all pagans," JC said with a wink, from a lovely pattern of bark on an old-growth sycamore in a heavily wooded forest somewhere in Bavaria.
Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.
Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SF Gate and in the Datebook section of the SF Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing. Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes a tiny photo of Mark probably insufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.
As if that weren't enough, Mark also contributes to the hot, spankin' SF Gate Culture Blog.
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/gate/archive/2005/12/09/notes120905.DTL
A Wild West Romance? A Film Highly touted pre-release
Blogger's Comment. Watch for review in coming weeks. A buzz for a Western film about homo-sexual, same sex LOVE directed by an Asian. Thank goodness for liberalism and cultural elitism. More about earlier works with Mr. Lee
http://www.salon.com/ent/int/1997/10/17lee.html
December 9, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW 'BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN'
Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.
One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.
The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.
The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."
That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.
This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.
Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.
So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.
When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.
Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery.
The reunited lovers rush to a motel.
So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.
Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.
The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.
"Brokeback Mountain" is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.
Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.
Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."
One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.
"Brokeback Mountain" is rated R. It has mild violence and sexual situations.
Brokeback Mountain
Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Directed by Ang Lee; written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production designer, Judy Becker; produced by Ms. Ossana and James Schamus; released by Focus Features. Running time: 134 minutes.
WITH: Heath Ledger (Ennis Del Mar), Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist), Linda Cardellini (Cassie), Anna Faris (Lashawn Malone), Anne Hathaway (Lureen Newsome), Michelle Williams (Alma), Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre) and Kate Mara (Alma Jr.).
http://www.salon.com/ent/int/1997/10/17lee.html
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December 9, 2005
MOVIE REVIEW 'BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN'
Riding the High Country, Finding and Losing Love
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
THE lonesome chill that seeps through Ang Lee's epic western, "Brokeback Mountain," is as bone deep as the movie's heartbreaking story of two cowboys who fall in love almost by accident. It is embedded in the craggy landscape where their idyll begins and ends. It creeps into the farthest corners of the wide-open spaces they share with coyotes, bears and herds of sheep and rises like a stifled cry into the big, empty sky that stretches beyond the horizon.
One night, when their campfire dies, and the biting cold drives them to huddle together in a bedroll, a sudden spark between Ennis Del Mar (Heath Ledger) and Jack Twist (Jake Gyllenhaal) flares into an undying flame.
The same mood of acute desolation permeates the spare, gnarly prose of Annie Proulx's short story, first published in The New Yorker in 1997, adapted by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana. Mr. McMurtry knows about loneliness. Its ache suffused his novel and his screenplay for "The Last Picture Show," made into a film 34 years ago by Peter Bogdanovich.
The sexual bouts between these two ranch hands who have never heard the term gay (in 1963, when the story begins, it was still a code word transiting into the mainstream) are described by Ms. Proulx as "quick, rough, laughing and snorting."
That's exactly how Mr. Lee films their first sexual grappling (discreetly) in the shadows of the cramped little tent. The next morning, Ennis mumbles, "I'm no queer." And Jack replies, "Me neither." Still, they do it again, and again, in the daylight as well as at night. Sometimes their pent-up passions explode in ferocious roughhouse that is indistinguishable from fighting.
This moving and majestic film would be a landmark if only because it is the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture that Leslie Fiedler discerned in his notorious 1948 Partisan Review essay, "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey." Fiedler characterized the bond between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, a runaway slave, as an unconscious romantic attachment shared by two males of different races as they flee the more constraining and civilizing domain of women. He went on to identify that bond as a recurrent theme in American literature.
In popular culture, Fiedler's Freudianism certainly could be applied to the Lone Ranger and Tonto. Minus the ethnic division, it might also be widened to include a long line of westerns and buddy movies, from "Red River" to "Midnight Cowboy" to "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid": the pure male bonding that dare not explore its shadow side.
Ennis and Jack's 20-year romance begins when they are hired in the summer of 1963 by Joe Aguirre (Randy Quaid), a hard-boiled rancher, to work as sheepherders on Brokeback Mountain in the Wyoming high country. (The movie was filmed in Alberta, in the Canadian Rockies.) Subsisting mostly on canned beans and whiskey, the two cowboys develop a boozy friendship by the campfire.
So taciturn and bottled up that he swallows his syllables as he pulls words out of his mouth in gruff, reluctant grunts, Ennis tells Jack of being raised by a brother and sister after his parents died in a car crash; Jack, brought up in the rodeo, is more talkative and recalls his lifelong alienation from his father, a bull rider.
When signs of an early blizzard cut short their summer employment, Ennis and Jack go their separate ways; Ennis's farewell is a simple "See you around." Both, though, are torn up. Ennis marries his girlfriend, Alma (Michelle Williams), and they have two daughters. Jack meets and marries Lureen (Anne Hathaway), a Texan rodeo queen, with whom he has a son, and joins her father's farm-equipment business.
Four years pass before Jack, who is living in Texas, sends a general-delivery postcard to Ennis, who has settled in Wyoming, saying he will be in the area and would like to visit. The instant they set eyes on each other, their suspended passion erupts into a spontaneous clinch. Alma sees it all, and her face, from that moment on, remains frozen in misery.
The reunited lovers rush to a motel.
So begins a sporadic and tormented affair in which the two meet once or twice a year for fishing trips on which no fish are caught. Jack urges that they forsake their marriages and set up a ranch together. But Ennis, haunted by a childhood memory of his father taking him to see the mutilated body of a rancher, tortured and beaten to death with a tire iron for living with another man, is immobilized by fear and shame.
Both Mr. Ledger and Mr. Gyllenhaal make this anguished love story physically palpable. Mr. Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character. It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn. The pain and disappointment felt by Jack, who is softer, more self-aware and self-accepting, continually registers in Mr. Gyllenhaal's sad, expectant silver-dollar eyes.
The second half of the movie opens up Ms. Proulx's story to follow both men's slowly crumbling marriages. For years, Alma chokes on her pain until one day, after she and Ennis have divorced, it rises up as if she were strangling on her own bile. As Jack, desperately frustrated, has clandestine encounters with other men, Ms. Hathaway's Lureen slowly calcifies into a clenched robotic shell of her peppery younger self.
"Brokeback Mountain" is not quite the period piece that some would like to imagine. America's squeaky closet doors may have swung open far enough for a gay rodeo circuit to flourish. But let's not kid ourselves. In large segments of American society, especially in sports and the military, those doors remain sealed. The murder of Matthew Shepard, after all, took place in "Brokeback" territory. Another recent film, "Jarhead" (in which Mr. Gyllenhaal plays a marine), suggests how any kind of male behavior perceived as soft and feminine within certain closed male environments triggers abuse and violence and how that repression of sexual energy is directly channeled into warfare.
Yet "Brokeback Mountain" is ultimately not about sex (there is very little of it in the film) but about love: love stumbled into, love thwarted, love held sorrowfully in the heart.
Or, as Ms. Proulx writes, "What Jack remembered and craved in a way he could neither help nor understand was the time that distant summer on Brokeback when Ennis had come up behind him and pulled him close, the silent embrace satisfying some shared and sexless hunger."
One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.
"Brokeback Mountain" is rated R. It has mild violence and sexual situations.
Brokeback Mountain
Opens today in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Directed by Ang Lee; written by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana, based on the short story by Annie Proulx; director of photography, Rodrigo Prieto; edited by Geraldine Peroni and Dylan Tichenor; music by Gustavo Santaolalla; production designer, Judy Becker; produced by Ms. Ossana and James Schamus; released by Focus Features. Running time: 134 minutes.
WITH: Heath Ledger (Ennis Del Mar), Jake Gyllenhaal (Jack Twist), Linda Cardellini (Cassie), Anna Faris (Lashawn Malone), Anne Hathaway (Lureen Newsome), Michelle Williams (Alma), Randy Quaid (Joe Aguirre) and Kate Mara (Alma Jr.).
Thursday, December 08, 2005
A review of Alito's writing -A very conservative Judge
Review of Alito's opinions finds clear pattern
By Stephen Henderson and Howard Mintz
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON (KRT) - During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws.
A Knight Ridder review of Alito's 311 published opinions on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals - each of singular legal or public policy importance - found a clear pattern. Although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big businesses.
Despite the intense focus on whether Alito would cast the decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, he has had scant opportunity as a judge to address the issue. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration in 1985, he did advocate overturning the landmark abortion ruling. But it's his record in matters that routinely come before the Supreme Court that suggests he's likely to be more reliably conservative than Sandra Day O'Connor, the justice he would replace.
Liberal and conservative supporters alike describe the quiet, scholarly Alito as a restrained judge who follows the law, not his personal beliefs. Those who've worked closely with him, including former law clerks and fellow judges, say they can't think of a case in which he took a partisan political stance.
"As you can probably glean from his opinions, he's a conservative," said former 3rd Circuit Judge Timothy Lewis, a more liberal judge who served with Alito from 1992 to 2000 and supports the nomination. "I'm very comfortable with his judicial philosophy, though it was very different than mine. It only works if the judge doesn't have an agenda. He is not result-oriented."
Alito's voluminous judicial record, however, puts him among the nation's most conservative judges.
"Alito is more conservative than O'Connor; this isn't a hard question," said Rory Little, a Hastings College of the Law professor in San Francisco and a former Supreme Court clerk who praised Alito's credentials. "This isn't a guy who is going to vote in a way that will make anybody on the left happy."
A review of Alito's work on dozens of cases that raised important social issues found that he rarely supports individual rights claims.
The primary exception has been his opinions about First Amendment protections. Alito has been a near free-speech absolutist in his writings, and he's been equally strong on protecting religious freedoms.
But even some of his First Amendment opinions underscore the bent in the rest of his work. He hasn't strictly enforced church-state separation, and his love of the First Amendment seems to stop at the prison walls. He has written opinions that would deny prisoners access to reading materials and curtail their rights to practice their religious beliefs.
In other areas, Alito often goes out of his way to narrow the scope of individual rights, sometimes reaching out to undo lower-court rulings that affirmed those rights.
In one notable ruling, Alito snatched a lower-court victory from a group of diabetic inmates who alleged their jailers didn't adequately treat their illness.
Alito has been particularly rigid in employment discrimination cases.
Many conservative jurists set a high bar for plaintiffs who allege racial, gender or age bias in the workplace, but Alito has seldom found merit in a bias claim.
He has written in at least 18 discrimination cases and has sided with plaintiffs four times, including once when white police officers claimed that Pittsburgh's affirmative action policy unfairly disadvantaged them and another time when a mentally disabled grocery store worker was fired.
Alito also sided with a disabled New Jersey police dispatcher and once with a female employee who said she'd been sexually harassed but couldn't show that she'd suffered monetary loss as a result.
Like his opinions in other areas, Alito's work in discrimination cases is nearly devoid of explosive language or dismissive tones. His arguments have been convincing to his colleagues: Thirteen of his rulings were for the 3rd Circuit majority, meaning that at least one other judge on the court agreed with him.
But in most of the employment discrimination cases, Alito succeeded in applying a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires to plaintiffs' claims, often forcing them to prove that bias was the motivation behind their misfortunes.
In two cases, Alito dissented from 3rd Circuit rulings that allowed discrimination claims to proceed. In one, a racial discrimination case involving a black hotel maid, Alito agreed that the woman had been treated unfairly, but he said that the employer had produced enough evidence to show that the unfair treatment didn't amount to illegal discrimination.
In the second case, a gender discrimination claim, Alito accused the majority of making it too easy for the plaintiffs to get to trial.
Alito's other opinions on discrimination reveal similar skepticism. He has written consistently that plaintiffs failed to prove that bias was the "determinative" factor in their misfortunes and that the courts should resist subjecting employers to second-guessing about routine personnel matters.
In one case, Clowes v. Allegheny Valley Hospital, he overruled a jury verdict in favor of a nurse who claimed age discrimination. Janet Clowes, a nurse who'd worked at the hospital for 30 years, alleged that her employer's harassment effectively forced her to quit her job, called constructive discharge.
Alito's decision to overturn the jury verdict was an aggressive move, seemingly at odds with his usual restraint.
"We recognize that the jury ... presumably concluded ... that (the supervisor) treated Clowes unfairly," Alito wrote. "But it is clear that unfair treatment is by no means the same as constructive discharge."
Alito's record also suggests that the former New Jersey U.S. attorney seldom strays far from his prosecutorial roots and remains reluctant to side with criminal defendants. His tough views on crime and punishment are likely to cement the Supreme Court's rightward movement in that area, particularly when it comes to evaluating the complex federal sentencing laws and the ongoing efforts by Congress to write new criminal laws.
In 60 criminal appeals that resulted in published decisions in which he wrote a majority, dissenting or concurring opinion, Alito sided with a defendant's key argument in 12 cases, most of the time sending a case back to a lower court judge for a new sentencing hearing.
Alito voted to overturn two convictions in those cases, excluding appeals where he left a central conviction intact but set aside other offenses.
But from police searches to the death penalty, Alito has rarely been persuaded to overturn a conviction or sentence.
His view of habeas corpus rights - the chief legal window through which a death row inmate seeks a reprieve - has been particularly restrictive. Because the death penalty is one of the high court's most active areas of criminal review and because O'Connor has been the swing vote in many capital cases, Alito's confirmation could mean a dramatic change.
Alito has taken part in at least 10 cases involving death row inmates since 1991, and he's sided with the defendants in two and allowed a third capital case to proceed in federal court without taking a position on the merits. That puts him among the 3rd Circuit's most conservative jurists when it comes to the death penalty.
Former 3rd Circuit Chief Judge Edward Becker, appointed by President Reagan, has sided with death row inmates eight times in as many cases in the same period.
In one death row case, the Supreme Court ruled that Alito was wrong. Ronald Rompilla, a Pennsylvania death row inmate, would have been executed this year under Alito's reasoning. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling this June authored by O'Connor, found that Rompilla received such dreadful representation at his 1988 trial that his death sentence should be overturned, a rebuke to Alito's view that his lawyer did enough to protect his rights.
The death penalty case that appears to best illustrate Alito's stance came in 2001, when a splintered 3rd Circuit overturned the death sentence of James William Riley, who was on Delaware's death row for the 1982 murder of a liquor store owner.
The majority expressed deep concerns about racial bias in the selection of Riley's jury, citing the fact that prosecutors dismissed all three prospective black jurors. Defense lawyers also produced evidence that no black juror had sat on any Dover capital case during the time when Riley, who is black, was on trial.
"One of the principal objections to the operation of the death penalty in this country is that it is applied unevenly, particularly against black defendants," wrote 3rd Circuit Judge Dolores Sloviter, one of the court's more liberal judges.
Alito was unmoved. He argued that much more than legal worry is required to justify overturning the findings of a state court, particularly in a death penalty case.
"Reviewing habeas decisions in capital cases is one of the most important and difficult responsibilities of this court," he wrote. "Our role is vital - but limited - and is not to be confused with that of the jury or the various branches of state government."
Alito called the majority's finding "simplistic" and added that it treated the challenge of the jurors as "if they had no relevant characteristics other than race, as if they were in effect black and white marbles in a jar from which lawyers drew."
To supporters and detractors, that was vintage Alito. He demands clear proof that something is awry, not just inference - and the burden of proof is high.
He wrote a majority decision this year ordering a new murder trial for defendant Curtis Brinson - but only after the record showed that a Philadelphia prosecutor had dismissed 13 of 14 prospective black jurors, then showed up in a training videotape explaining ways to keep black jurors off criminal trials.
"It shows a very consistent conservative record of deferring to either the state courts or deferring to police and prosecutors in criminal cases," said David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who argued numerous criminal cases before Alito. "It seems that unless the error is very egregious, he won't step in."
Alito's deference to law enforcement is most evident when he has addressed allegations that police and prosecutors overstepped their constitutional bounds.
The judge's supporters insist that he won't rubber-stamp law enforcement's conduct. In his 1998 decision in the case of Jesse Kithcart, who was convicted of federal gun charges, for example, Alito sided with the defendant's core argument.
Alito found that Kithcart's conviction had been tainted by an unconstitutional police search. Evidence showed that police searching for a robber stopped Kithcart only because he was the first black they saw driving a sports car after they were alerted to look for "two black males in a black sports car."
"The mere fact Kithcart is black and the perpetrators had been described as two black males is plainly insufficient," Alito wrote.
Still, Alito's record shows a strong deference to police authority.
In a decision last year, he endorsed an 18-month FBI undercover probe that included audio and video monitoring of boxing promoter Robert W. Lee Sr.'s hotel suite, done without a federal judge's approval. Lee, a founder of the International Boxing Federation, was convicted of money laundering and tax evasion.
Although Alito found that the surveillance didn't violate Lee's privacy rights, a colleague dissented, saying: "The limitations of that Orwellian capability were not subject to any court order."
In one highly publicized case, Alito upheld a police strip search of a 10-year-old girl by arguing that a warrant that didn't mention the girl should be read "broadly." The ruling is a rare instance of a conservative jurist arguing for a departure from strict textual interpretation in favor of government intrusion.
And in another 1995 case, Alito dissented from two colleagues who found that a family's lawsuit over a 1990 drug raid could proceed. Inez Baker and her two teenage sons were forced to the ground at gunpoint and handcuffed as they arrived at another son's house for dinner.
Although Alito is the son of Italian immigrants, his record in immigration cases is similar to his perspective in criminal cases. He's demonstrated an inclination to defer to the judgment of the immigration courts, which are under the Justice Department's umbrella. As a result, a non-citizen fighting deportation is paddling upstream with Alito.
Legal scholars, and some of Alito's supporters, have pointed to his decision in the case of Parastoo Fatin, a young Iranian woman who was fighting deportation in the early 1990s, as evidence of his scholarship and his impact on immigration law. Alito ruled in Fatin's case that gender-based persecution could be grounds for asylum.
But the ruling was a hollow victory for Fatin. She lost her case when Alito found that she hadn't shown enough factual evidence to prove that she'd be persecuted if she were sent back to Iran. It was typical Alito - an impeccably crafted decision that denied relief to an individual.
"I'm not optimistic," said Lawrence Rudnick, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer who represented Fatin. "He's certainly not going to be good for immigrants' rights."
Alito has sided with non-citizens in seven of his 24 published rulings involving matters such as life-or-death bids for asylum. And when Alito has sided with an immigrant, it's often been on narrow grounds. Two instances involved Chinese women who produced evidence that they'd been targets of China's forced abortion policy, established grounds for asylum that are especially congenial to social conservatives.
In a third case, Alito found that Annagret Goetze, a German national, shouldn't be deported because she qualified as a religious worker for a Pennsylvania nonprofit committed to "Christianizing the ordinary aspects of life for the mentally handicapped."
Alito's deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the last word in the immigration system, will take on heightened importance if he joins the Supreme Court, which is likely to consider important new developments in immigration law.
Alito was part of a major 3rd Circuit decision two years ago that upheld the Bush administration's streamlining of the Board of Immigration Appeals. But his ruling was another stark reminder of his strict view of asylum claims. The majority overturned a perfunctory Board of Immigration Appeals decision to reject the asylum bid of Saidon Dia, who presented evidence that Guinean police were hunting for him and that political enemies had burned his house to the ground and raped his wife.
Alito dissented. While conceding that such cases are "among the most difficult we face," Alito found Dia hadn't produced enough proof to second-guess the immigration system.
"In cases where people are requesting asylum based on politics or a particular social group, he's very strict," said David Leopold, an Ohio immigration lawyer who's examined Alito's record for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Is someone fleeing forced abortion more deserving of protection than someone fleeing political persecution?"
Knight Ridder researcher Tish Wells contributed to this report.
By Stephen Henderson and Howard Mintz
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON (KRT) - During his 15 years on the federal bench, Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has worked quietly but resolutely to weave a conservative legal agenda into the fabric of the nation's laws.
A Knight Ridder review of Alito's 311 published opinions on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals - each of singular legal or public policy importance - found a clear pattern. Although Alito's opinions are rarely written with obvious ideology, he's seldom sided with a criminal defendant, a foreign national facing deportation, an employee alleging discrimination or consumers suing big businesses.
Despite the intense focus on whether Alito would cast the decisive vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, he has had scant opportunity as a judge to address the issue. As a young lawyer in the Reagan administration in 1985, he did advocate overturning the landmark abortion ruling. But it's his record in matters that routinely come before the Supreme Court that suggests he's likely to be more reliably conservative than Sandra Day O'Connor, the justice he would replace.
Liberal and conservative supporters alike describe the quiet, scholarly Alito as a restrained judge who follows the law, not his personal beliefs. Those who've worked closely with him, including former law clerks and fellow judges, say they can't think of a case in which he took a partisan political stance.
"As you can probably glean from his opinions, he's a conservative," said former 3rd Circuit Judge Timothy Lewis, a more liberal judge who served with Alito from 1992 to 2000 and supports the nomination. "I'm very comfortable with his judicial philosophy, though it was very different than mine. It only works if the judge doesn't have an agenda. He is not result-oriented."
Alito's voluminous judicial record, however, puts him among the nation's most conservative judges.
"Alito is more conservative than O'Connor; this isn't a hard question," said Rory Little, a Hastings College of the Law professor in San Francisco and a former Supreme Court clerk who praised Alito's credentials. "This isn't a guy who is going to vote in a way that will make anybody on the left happy."
A review of Alito's work on dozens of cases that raised important social issues found that he rarely supports individual rights claims.
The primary exception has been his opinions about First Amendment protections. Alito has been a near free-speech absolutist in his writings, and he's been equally strong on protecting religious freedoms.
But even some of his First Amendment opinions underscore the bent in the rest of his work. He hasn't strictly enforced church-state separation, and his love of the First Amendment seems to stop at the prison walls. He has written opinions that would deny prisoners access to reading materials and curtail their rights to practice their religious beliefs.
In other areas, Alito often goes out of his way to narrow the scope of individual rights, sometimes reaching out to undo lower-court rulings that affirmed those rights.
In one notable ruling, Alito snatched a lower-court victory from a group of diabetic inmates who alleged their jailers didn't adequately treat their illness.
Alito has been particularly rigid in employment discrimination cases.
Many conservative jurists set a high bar for plaintiffs who allege racial, gender or age bias in the workplace, but Alito has seldom found merit in a bias claim.
He has written in at least 18 discrimination cases and has sided with plaintiffs four times, including once when white police officers claimed that Pittsburgh's affirmative action policy unfairly disadvantaged them and another time when a mentally disabled grocery store worker was fired.
Alito also sided with a disabled New Jersey police dispatcher and once with a female employee who said she'd been sexually harassed but couldn't show that she'd suffered monetary loss as a result.
Like his opinions in other areas, Alito's work in discrimination cases is nearly devoid of explosive language or dismissive tones. His arguments have been convincing to his colleagues: Thirteen of his rulings were for the 3rd Circuit majority, meaning that at least one other judge on the court agreed with him.
But in most of the employment discrimination cases, Alito succeeded in applying a standard higher than the Supreme Court requires to plaintiffs' claims, often forcing them to prove that bias was the motivation behind their misfortunes.
In two cases, Alito dissented from 3rd Circuit rulings that allowed discrimination claims to proceed. In one, a racial discrimination case involving a black hotel maid, Alito agreed that the woman had been treated unfairly, but he said that the employer had produced enough evidence to show that the unfair treatment didn't amount to illegal discrimination.
In the second case, a gender discrimination claim, Alito accused the majority of making it too easy for the plaintiffs to get to trial.
Alito's other opinions on discrimination reveal similar skepticism. He has written consistently that plaintiffs failed to prove that bias was the "determinative" factor in their misfortunes and that the courts should resist subjecting employers to second-guessing about routine personnel matters.
In one case, Clowes v. Allegheny Valley Hospital, he overruled a jury verdict in favor of a nurse who claimed age discrimination. Janet Clowes, a nurse who'd worked at the hospital for 30 years, alleged that her employer's harassment effectively forced her to quit her job, called constructive discharge.
Alito's decision to overturn the jury verdict was an aggressive move, seemingly at odds with his usual restraint.
"We recognize that the jury ... presumably concluded ... that (the supervisor) treated Clowes unfairly," Alito wrote. "But it is clear that unfair treatment is by no means the same as constructive discharge."
Alito's record also suggests that the former New Jersey U.S. attorney seldom strays far from his prosecutorial roots and remains reluctant to side with criminal defendants. His tough views on crime and punishment are likely to cement the Supreme Court's rightward movement in that area, particularly when it comes to evaluating the complex federal sentencing laws and the ongoing efforts by Congress to write new criminal laws.
In 60 criminal appeals that resulted in published decisions in which he wrote a majority, dissenting or concurring opinion, Alito sided with a defendant's key argument in 12 cases, most of the time sending a case back to a lower court judge for a new sentencing hearing.
Alito voted to overturn two convictions in those cases, excluding appeals where he left a central conviction intact but set aside other offenses.
But from police searches to the death penalty, Alito has rarely been persuaded to overturn a conviction or sentence.
His view of habeas corpus rights - the chief legal window through which a death row inmate seeks a reprieve - has been particularly restrictive. Because the death penalty is one of the high court's most active areas of criminal review and because O'Connor has been the swing vote in many capital cases, Alito's confirmation could mean a dramatic change.
Alito has taken part in at least 10 cases involving death row inmates since 1991, and he's sided with the defendants in two and allowed a third capital case to proceed in federal court without taking a position on the merits. That puts him among the 3rd Circuit's most conservative jurists when it comes to the death penalty.
Former 3rd Circuit Chief Judge Edward Becker, appointed by President Reagan, has sided with death row inmates eight times in as many cases in the same period.
In one death row case, the Supreme Court ruled that Alito was wrong. Ronald Rompilla, a Pennsylvania death row inmate, would have been executed this year under Alito's reasoning. But the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 ruling this June authored by O'Connor, found that Rompilla received such dreadful representation at his 1988 trial that his death sentence should be overturned, a rebuke to Alito's view that his lawyer did enough to protect his rights.
The death penalty case that appears to best illustrate Alito's stance came in 2001, when a splintered 3rd Circuit overturned the death sentence of James William Riley, who was on Delaware's death row for the 1982 murder of a liquor store owner.
The majority expressed deep concerns about racial bias in the selection of Riley's jury, citing the fact that prosecutors dismissed all three prospective black jurors. Defense lawyers also produced evidence that no black juror had sat on any Dover capital case during the time when Riley, who is black, was on trial.
"One of the principal objections to the operation of the death penalty in this country is that it is applied unevenly, particularly against black defendants," wrote 3rd Circuit Judge Dolores Sloviter, one of the court's more liberal judges.
Alito was unmoved. He argued that much more than legal worry is required to justify overturning the findings of a state court, particularly in a death penalty case.
"Reviewing habeas decisions in capital cases is one of the most important and difficult responsibilities of this court," he wrote. "Our role is vital - but limited - and is not to be confused with that of the jury or the various branches of state government."
Alito called the majority's finding "simplistic" and added that it treated the challenge of the jurors as "if they had no relevant characteristics other than race, as if they were in effect black and white marbles in a jar from which lawyers drew."
To supporters and detractors, that was vintage Alito. He demands clear proof that something is awry, not just inference - and the burden of proof is high.
He wrote a majority decision this year ordering a new murder trial for defendant Curtis Brinson - but only after the record showed that a Philadelphia prosecutor had dismissed 13 of 14 prospective black jurors, then showed up in a training videotape explaining ways to keep black jurors off criminal trials.
"It shows a very consistent conservative record of deferring to either the state courts or deferring to police and prosecutors in criminal cases," said David Rudovsky, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who argued numerous criminal cases before Alito. "It seems that unless the error is very egregious, he won't step in."
Alito's deference to law enforcement is most evident when he has addressed allegations that police and prosecutors overstepped their constitutional bounds.
The judge's supporters insist that he won't rubber-stamp law enforcement's conduct. In his 1998 decision in the case of Jesse Kithcart, who was convicted of federal gun charges, for example, Alito sided with the defendant's core argument.
Alito found that Kithcart's conviction had been tainted by an unconstitutional police search. Evidence showed that police searching for a robber stopped Kithcart only because he was the first black they saw driving a sports car after they were alerted to look for "two black males in a black sports car."
"The mere fact Kithcart is black and the perpetrators had been described as two black males is plainly insufficient," Alito wrote.
Still, Alito's record shows a strong deference to police authority.
In a decision last year, he endorsed an 18-month FBI undercover probe that included audio and video monitoring of boxing promoter Robert W. Lee Sr.'s hotel suite, done without a federal judge's approval. Lee, a founder of the International Boxing Federation, was convicted of money laundering and tax evasion.
Although Alito found that the surveillance didn't violate Lee's privacy rights, a colleague dissented, saying: "The limitations of that Orwellian capability were not subject to any court order."
In one highly publicized case, Alito upheld a police strip search of a 10-year-old girl by arguing that a warrant that didn't mention the girl should be read "broadly." The ruling is a rare instance of a conservative jurist arguing for a departure from strict textual interpretation in favor of government intrusion.
And in another 1995 case, Alito dissented from two colleagues who found that a family's lawsuit over a 1990 drug raid could proceed. Inez Baker and her two teenage sons were forced to the ground at gunpoint and handcuffed as they arrived at another son's house for dinner.
Although Alito is the son of Italian immigrants, his record in immigration cases is similar to his perspective in criminal cases. He's demonstrated an inclination to defer to the judgment of the immigration courts, which are under the Justice Department's umbrella. As a result, a non-citizen fighting deportation is paddling upstream with Alito.
Legal scholars, and some of Alito's supporters, have pointed to his decision in the case of Parastoo Fatin, a young Iranian woman who was fighting deportation in the early 1990s, as evidence of his scholarship and his impact on immigration law. Alito ruled in Fatin's case that gender-based persecution could be grounds for asylum.
But the ruling was a hollow victory for Fatin. She lost her case when Alito found that she hadn't shown enough factual evidence to prove that she'd be persecuted if she were sent back to Iran. It was typical Alito - an impeccably crafted decision that denied relief to an individual.
"I'm not optimistic," said Lawrence Rudnick, a Philadelphia immigration lawyer who represented Fatin. "He's certainly not going to be good for immigrants' rights."
Alito has sided with non-citizens in seven of his 24 published rulings involving matters such as life-or-death bids for asylum. And when Alito has sided with an immigrant, it's often been on narrow grounds. Two instances involved Chinese women who produced evidence that they'd been targets of China's forced abortion policy, established grounds for asylum that are especially congenial to social conservatives.
In a third case, Alito found that Annagret Goetze, a German national, shouldn't be deported because she qualified as a religious worker for a Pennsylvania nonprofit committed to "Christianizing the ordinary aspects of life for the mentally handicapped."
Alito's deference to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the last word in the immigration system, will take on heightened importance if he joins the Supreme Court, which is likely to consider important new developments in immigration law.
Alito was part of a major 3rd Circuit decision two years ago that upheld the Bush administration's streamlining of the Board of Immigration Appeals. But his ruling was another stark reminder of his strict view of asylum claims. The majority overturned a perfunctory Board of Immigration Appeals decision to reject the asylum bid of Saidon Dia, who presented evidence that Guinean police were hunting for him and that political enemies had burned his house to the ground and raped his wife.
Alito dissented. While conceding that such cases are "among the most difficult we face," Alito found Dia hadn't produced enough proof to second-guess the immigration system.
"In cases where people are requesting asylum based on politics or a particular social group, he's very strict," said David Leopold, an Ohio immigration lawyer who's examined Alito's record for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. "Is someone fleeing forced abortion more deserving of protection than someone fleeing political persecution?"
Knight Ridder researcher Tish Wells contributed to this report.
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